I’ve put up the default WordPress template since it is basic as it can get without any frills so I can test to see if that has any effect on performance.

I got in this morning and my server was eating up cpu’s again. Since making the change to the the default template, it has been quiet. I’ll keep it up for a few hours this morning to see how it handles the noon traffic.

Update

For those who want to be in on the loop. Here is what my server is looking like right now:

The number you want to look at is the 223628k used which is how much RAM the server is eating. 223MB is about normal for my blog which gets about 500 to 700 hits an hour. It hasn’t gone above 250MB since I put in the default theme which means either:

1. The type of traffic that was giving me problems hasn’t shown up.

2. There’s some script in my old theme which is eating up cpu cycles and memory (the temp theme I used last week was a poor test since I was too quick too add the old theme’s code to it.

3. I dunno. I haven’t thought this far ahead.

I’ll keep this default theme up past noon so I can keep an eye on the memory being used. In the old theme, we would spike past 800Megs throughout the day. I have no idea how to debug a theme so if the memory stays low, I’ll have to find a nice clean efficient theme so I can concentrate more on blogging and not keeping the damn thing from crashing every 20 minutes.

Chris,
Are you sure it’s the theme causing it, I’d be more inclined to investigate the plugins you have installed, particularly as you’ve tried a few now and it seems to keep happening?
Maybe this ‘debug theme’ may be of use…http://yoast.com/wordpress-debug-theme/
.. and if you use it with the theme tester plugin linked there, you can get all the debug info without everyone else seeing it.
A

I had no plugins active. I’m certain it wasn’t the plugins. I’m fairly certain that it was some bad php in the other theme at this point.

Thanks for the debut theme. I may give that a try if this doesn’t work. But so far, no spikes at all since switching to this new theme. And I had already had several this morning before trying the switch.

In my case I was showing the user’s UID next to their name by pulling up their account and getting the info that way, but unfortunately it was causing an additional sql call for every person taht commented. Little did I know that wordpress actually stores that information with the comments in the wp_comments table.